Saturday, April 4, 2009

Going from Trac to Bugzilla

It is time we go serious, so we should use some serious tools :P.

First of all, why switching to Bugzilla? Trac is a nice tool; you get almost everything you need with one installation, not to say how is easy to set it up. On other hand, Trac is trying to be everything, so you get something from every other tool it copies. The key here is "something".

Honestly, I was afraid of Bugzilla. It's interface makes me cry, it's database layout makes me go nuts, but in the end, it has one important property Trac is missing: damint stabile codebase. Not to say how you can configure almost every possible detail in it.

One thing sucks badly: you can't find usable scripts to do transition. With Trac, you already get bugzilla2trac.py script (if I can remember), but opposite... you can't find it easily.

So, after searching and searching, one day Google was in the good mood and spit out in the first page of search results link on the Will's blog, a nice guy that had the similar problem. The best thing of all was he already wrote a script for own database transition. Excellent! And Will, thank you a lot!

The script is a little bit specific for his Trac database, but with a little python knowledge, few tries and small amount of luck, you can get it working for own case.

Luckily, the number of our bugs is not huge, so running script with the few manual interventions completed the job. Sweet! Now, we even have a nicely separated eFLTK and EDE bugs ;)